The birth of Tom Hanks, dramatic actor, happened during a table read on "Splash." As the smitten lead Allen Bauer in Ron Howard's 1984 film, Hanks began by going for laughs, an instinct from the sitcom "Bosom Buddies."

"And it didn't go well," Hanks recalled. "Ron said to me, literally, 'Look, I know what you're doing, and you can't do that here. You're not the guy to be funny. These are not jokes. You have to love that girl.'"

Hanks wasn't done with comedy ("The Bachelor Party," for one, was to follow), but his trajectory was altered for good.

"So off it began," said Hanks, who realizes it could have easily gone another direction. "I wasn't that far away from putting together three minutes at the Improv."

Some will always wonder what might have happened had Hanks, with a rare gift for comic timing, put those three minutes together. But three decades after that course correction from Howard, Hanks, 57, might have just given the finest dramatic performance of his career.

In "Captain Phillips," Hanks bears none of that youthful, comic energy, but rather the skill of a grizzled veteran. Gray-bearded and in glasses, his Captain Richard Phillips is for Hanks -- who has made a career out of playing ordinary guys -- the most regular Joe of them all: a working-class, cargo ship captain from Vermont.

The film is based on the 2009 incident where Phillips' ship, the Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

The role is almost certain to land Hanks his sixth Oscar nomination (he won for "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump"), yet it's been more than a decade since he was last nominated (for "Cast Away" in 2001).

In between, he's had some duds ("The Da Vinci Code," "Angels & Demons," both with Howard), tried farce with the Coen brothers ("The Ladykillers") and attempted some interesting stretches (playing six characters in last year's "Cloud Atlas").

He's directed his second film ("Larry Crown"), made his Broadway debut (Nora Ephron's "Lucky Guy") and expanded his production company, Playtone, into digital media ("Electric City" for Yahoo).

But with the exception of the snappy and smart "Charlie Wilson's War" (which, unlike "Captain Phillips," traded on Hanks' charisma) it has been a while since Hanks has been so well suited to a film.

"I'm too old now to have an idea of what I'm going to do," said Hanks, who revealed on "The Late Show" that he has type 2 diabetes.

"Movies, they're like leaves on a river," said Hanks, who also stars as Walt Disney in the upcoming "Saving Mr. Banks." "You've got to sit by and collect them as they go by." (He immediately repeats the phrase in the mock voice of a wise shaman.)

Though Hanks was initially drawn to the story by Phillips' memoir (the actor twice went to Vermont to meet with the captain) and the script by Billy Ray, working with Paul Greengrass (the director of "United 93" and "Bloody Sunday") meant a very different experience. The British director rehearses at length and then shoots long, unblocked scenes with hand-held cameras.

Raising to the same kind of exasperated inflection as his famous "There's no crying in baseball" line from "A League of Their Own," Hanks recalls his initial puzzlement at how Greengrass crafts such verisimilitude.

"I said, 'I don't know how he does this! How does he get this?'" Hanks said. "Look, I know how movies are made -- the shots and the thing and the storyboards and all that kind of stuff. I know that. But how does he do this?"

Hanks found that he relished the process, allowing him to focus purely on behavior: "We didn't have to worry about lights or marks, particularly. The scene just took us every place that the scene took us."

Greengrass isn't prone to hyperbole, but he plainly states that Hanks is "a great American, a truly great man."

"In a cinematic era where the landscape is dominated by superheroes ... he's an actor who's built that fantastic career playing ordinary men," Greengrass said.